Environment Texas Blog

Today, Environment Texas Director Luke Metzger joined with other environmental and public health leaders to call on the city of Austin to "quit coal" and invest in wind and solar power instead. Here is the statement he delivered at the City Hall press conference.

"Austin has a dirty little secret. We like to pride ourselves on being one of the greenest cities in America, but we still get one-third of our electricity from a dirty coal-fired power plant about 75 miles from Austin. This coal plant, known as Fayette, is responsible for a host of major public health and environmental problems.  Pollution from its smokestacks trigger asthma attacks, contaminate our fish with brain-damaging mercury and, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, cause the deaths of 44 people every year. And at a time when Austin is working to lead the way on solutions to global warming, the Fayette power plant pumps out more than 10 million tons of global warming pollution every year. In this day and age, it’s unacceptable for Austin to still be in the coal business, so it’s time to either shut down or sell the Fayette coal plant.

In its draft generation plan, Austin Energy seeks to phase out the use of the Fayette plant, running it at 60% capacity by 2020. The plan is headed in the right direction, but we should get completely out of coal, just as the city of Los Angeles recently announced.

We have alternatives. According to consultants to Austin Energy, replacing the Fayette coal plant with wind and solar power would get us to 54% renewable energy by 2020. This would create thousands of local jobs, clean up our environment and set an example for the world of a fossil-fuel free future.